false dichotomy by charles davis

Saturday, July 25, 2015

I didn't used to see tents when I moved to Koreatown two years ago,
but when the city of Los Angeles revealed that there's been an 85
percent increase in people living in such makeshift shelters during that
time I thought: Yup, I've seen it -- first there was one, then there
was three, then there were entire tent cities. That spurred me to write a
story about the problem and the city's approach to it, which -- the
occasionally liberal rhetoric of the mayor aside -- can be summed up as:
What if we just made it illegal to be that damn poor? Today The Intercept published that story. It is my personal opinion that you should read it.

Also, for Inter Press Service, I reviewed a new book, Against All Odds: Voices of Popular Struggle in Iraq. I'd read that too -- the book and the review.

Friday, July 17, 2015

The only thing that sucks more than having a job is not having but needing one -- and as I note in my latest piece for The Baffler, there are more people looking for work than there is work to offer, a fact those with the power to hire and fire have exploited to make the job search an even more degrading process that is statistically more likely to entrench self-loathing than lead to gainful employment. Read the piece and maybe give me a job.

Oh, and for LAist I wrote about efforts to legalize street vendors in Los Angeles and critics who say taco trucks attract sex workers. Check that out.﻿

Monday, June 15, 2015

The Los Angeles Police Commission said the two LAPD officers who in
August 2015 shot and killed an unarmed, mentally man named Ezell Ford
acted improperly -- and I wrote about how that doesn't mean a whole lot,
unfortunately, given that the commission has no actual power to
discipline anyone. Check it out at TakePart.

Friday, June 05, 2015

Last month, I attended a protest outside a Nestlé water-bottling
facility in South Los Angeles and spoke to a woman in an orangutan mask
who objects to the world's largest food and beverage company profiting
from the out-of-state sale of drought-stricken California's water. You can read my account here.

Earlier
this week, California's state senate approved a bill that would
strictly limit the use of solitary confinement at juvenile detention
facilities. When I asked the Department of Corrections and
Rehabilitation to comment on the legislation, I was told that there is
no such thing as "solitary confinement" in California, the people who
say they experienced it apparently mistaken (the state says the presence
of a television, or the ability to take correspondence courses, means
one is not truly in isolation). Read my report here.

Thursday, May 07, 2015

I had two pieces published recently by Inter Press Service: One is (nominally) a review of Muhammad Idrees Ahmad's new book seeking to explain why the United States invaded Iraq; the other, co-authored with IPS's DC bureau chief, Jim Lobe, is a response to The Washington Post editorial board claiming that the president of Argentina, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner,
is an anti-Semite for having noted the financial ties between hedge fund
manager Paul Singer and the various right-wing groups and hacks that
have attempted to paint her country as a deadbeat ally of Iranian-backed
terrorism.

Wednesday, April 22, 2015

Israeli
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu likened Hamas to al Qaeda, ISIS and
other extremist Islamist groups Tuesday as he implored the international
community to hold Palestinian militants responsible for the bloodshed
in Gaza. Israel's top politician said Hamas must be held accountable for
rejecting multiple cease-fire agreements and a relentless attack on
Israeli civilians.
Netanyahu made his comments at a joint press
conference in Tel Aviv alongside U.N. chief Ban Ki-moon. "What we're
seeing here with Hamas is another instance of Islamist extremism,
violent extremism that has no resolvable grievance," Netanyahu said.
"Hamas is like ISIS, Hamas is like al Qaeda, Hamas is like Hezbollah,
Hamas is like Boko Haram."

A
month after an Egyptian court ruled that Hamas’s armed wing, the Izz
ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, was a terror organization, another court on
Saturday branded the entire group — including its political wing — with
the same designation.
Since Egypt’s military ousted Islamist
president Mohamed Morsi in 2013, the authorities have accused Hamas of
aiding jihadists who have waged a string of deadly attacks on security
forces in the Sinai Peninsula.

The
Syrian regime no longer has any relationship with former ally Hamas and
will never trust the movement again, Syrian President Bashar Assad said
in an interview published Friday.
"There is no relation at all on
the formal level or on the popular level," the president told Swedish
newspaper Expressen, adding, "I don't think the Syrian people will trust
them anymore."
Assad alleged that the movement had allied itself with extremist militants fighting in Syria.
He
said that recent events in Yarmouk refugee camp "have proved that part
of Hamas, which is basically a Muslim Brotherhood organisation, supports
al-Nusra Front."

Monday, April 20, 2015

As a writer, it’s always nice to find that something you wrote did
not just disappear into the worldwide abyss, but was actually read by
someone – someone who liked it, even. So as I was sitting in my living
room on Sunday night engaged in my biweekly pondering of whether or not I
should quit journalism and go work at the artificial flower factory, I
was pleasantly surprised and somewhat alarmed when a user of the social
network “Twitter” alerted me to the fact that a two-part series I wrote for
Inter Press Service back in 2013 was making the rounds in Argentina and
was being cited by President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner (or, presumably, an intern) on her official website.

“Wait, what?” was my in-real-time response, but I’ve since pieced together and here’s the deal: That two-part series – part one; part two
– concerned U.S. hedge fund manager Paul Singer’s attempts to defame
Argentina as a deadbeat backer of international terrorism as part of his
campaign to shake down the South American nation for billions of
dollars. In 2002, the Argentine government defaulted on its debt and
while it reached deals with 93 percent of its bondholders to pay them
back a fraction of what they were owed, people like Singer – people who
run what are called “vulture funds” that do this sort of thing all the
time – bought up a bunch of those defaulted bonds and took Argentina to
court in New York City, de facto finance capital of the world, where he insisted it pay all that was owed. So far he’s winning.

In
addition to the legal battle, Singer has been fighting in the court of
public opinion, using millions of his ought-to-be-confiscated wealth to
fund a whole bunch of far-right hacks and the think tanks that employ
them to link Argentina to terrorism by way of Iran. At the same time, in
Argentina, prosecutor Alberto Nisman was investigating the 1994 bombing
of the Asociación Mutual Israelita Argentina (AMIA) in Buenos Aires,
which killed 85 people. Nisman was murdered in January, found in his
apartment with a bullet in the head, but before he died he alleged that
the Kirchner government was helping Iran cover up its role in that
bombing so as not to jeopardize its expanding economic relations with
the Islamic Republic. Singer, naturally, exploited this, with Nisman
becoming a hero to neoconservatives and Republican lawmakers in
Washington who are ever eager to allege that Iran is engaged in the same
nefarious actions in Latin America as a previous generation accused
deceased bogeyman, the Soviet Union; now as then, the allegations make
headlines, but they rarely stand up to scrutiny.

I
don’t know who carried out the 1994 bombing: Some have charged that
Iranian officials, acting officially or not, ordered the attack, while
others claim right-wing elements in Argentina’s intelligence service did
it (the Kirchner government has accused these same alleged elements of
feeding disinformation to Nisman and then killing him the night before
he was set to deliver his findings to Congress, presumably an attempt at
a “false flag”). What I do know is that in my reporting on Paul Singer I
never uncovered any direct financial links between him and Alberto
Nisman, though that appears to be the charge now being made by Kirchner and Jorge Elbaum, writing in the pro-government newspaper, Página/12 (there’s
an English translation on Kirchner’s website, seemingly thanks to
Google). It’s a convenient allegation, combining two problems facing the
Argentine state into one neat little enemy, but it's also not one that my reporting made. I’m not saying Nisman definitely didn’t
get any of that sweet Singer cash or steer some of it to his allies,
just that from what I know Nisman’s crusade – he was appointed as a
special prosecutor to look into the AMIA bombing by Kirchner’s deceased
husband – was merely exploited by Singer and his allies in pursuit of
their own, what-appears-to-be-separate agenda, not directly funded by
his ill-gotten wealth.

Anyway, as far as being cited by a head of state goes, it could be worse but I don't really want it to happen again.

Sunday, April 19, 2015

When you write for the same outlet for a year or two, you end up
building a rapport with the editor you deal with, a relationship that,
over time, makes it easier to get pitches accepted – or at the very
least gets those pitches acknowledged. When that editor leaves, though,
often enough so does the relationship with that outlet; oh, you’ll get
an email for the new guy or gal you are supposed to deal with from there
on out, but to that new person you are just another poor scrub filling
up their overcrowded inbox with a proposal for a think piece on what
“Game of Thrones” can teach us about the conflict in Syria.

Which
brings me to my point: I need another editor, my last one at a national
publication choosing to leave me for some hot new sketchy start-up.
Could it be you?
My ideal partner is: Compassionate, but not a
pushover; firm, but gentle; rigorous, but not a god damn pedant; and
good with words, but not intent on replacing every other one that I
write with a synonym.

What I can offer: A rollicking but
respectful back-and-forth regarding every little edit you make – I’ll
keep you honest! – and, of course, exposure. You could be my editor; just think of all the doors that will open. If you think you have what it takes, submit an application to charles@freecharlesdavis.com.
Be sure to include a paragraph or two on why I should choose you out of
the dozens of other qualified candidates to edit the words that I
write. And good luck!

Thursday, April 16, 2015

The New York Review of Books has a . . . review . . . of a book . . . about the 1939-1941 alliance between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. Fun quote:

“I
know how much the German nation loves its Führer, I should therefore
like to drink to his health." -- Josef Stalin, who in a wink-and-a-nod
toward Hitler's anti-Semitism sacked his Jewish foreign minister ahead
of the negotiations to divvy up Eastern Europe.

Sergei
Baryshnikov, one of the leading local ideologists of Novorossiya and
the rector of Donetsk University, told me that we were now “at the first
stage” of the recreation of a Russian state that would eventually take
in everything that had once belonged to pre-revolutionary, imperial
Russia. That would mean most of modern Ukraine and the three Baltic
states. The exception would be Lviv and the far west of Ukraine, which
before 1941 had belonged to Poland, and to the Austro-Hungarian Empire
until 1918. They might be left out of the new expanded Russia. But he
sees the restoration of the imperial Russian borders as “our historical
mission.” The very idea of a Ukrainian nation was like a cancer and
needed to be extirpated, he said.

Whether or not everyone in the
local leadership agrees with Baryshnikov and his call for a struggle
that he believes could last years or decades is not so important. What
is important is that his are ideas that feed into the creation of a
general worldview, not just of the rebels but in policymaking circles
close to Putin, whom Baryshnikov described as “our president” and “de
facto, our leader.”

The National Security Archive at
George Washington University has released U.S. government documents
concerning the Eisenhower administration's discovery that Israel had developed nuclear weapons:

In
the last months of 1960 as the presidency of Dwight D. Eisenhower was
coming to a close, the U.S. government discovered that Israel had been
building, with French assistance, a secret nuclear reactor near Dimona
in the Negev Desert that could give Israel a nuclear weapons potential.
The discovery caused apprehension within the Eisenhower administration
by invoking concerns about regional stability and nuclear proliferation,
but it also produced annoyance because Israeli officials at all levels
provided less than credible answers to U.S. questions about Dimona.

One
episode that helped create a sense of deception was that, in response
to initial U.S. official questions about the construction site, the
Israelis said it would be a textile factory. Over the years the "textile
factory" story has acquired legendary status, but exactly when the
story came about has been a mystery. But recently unearthed U.S.
government documents — an embassy telegram and a memorandum by the
Deputy Chief of Mission — help solve this historical puzzle. They show
that during a helicopter flight in September 1960, with American
Ambassador Ogden Reid and others of his staff on board, not far from the
reactor site, Ambassador Reid (or one of the travelers) asked what the
big construction site was. Their host, Addy Cohen, a senior Treasury
Ministry official, replied, "Why, that's a textile plant." In December
1960, when the Dimona issue was publicly exposed, Cohen was asked why he
had said "textile factory." He responded: "that was our story at the
time." Cohen acknowledged that "we have been misbehaving" by keeping
Dimona secret, but justified the project as a "deterrent" against Arab
neighbors.'

The
Turkish government acknowledges that atrocities were committed, but
says they happened in wartime, when plenty of other people were dying.
Officials stoutly deny there was ever any plan to systematically wipe
out the Armenian population — the commonly accepted definition of
genocide.

####

“The Armenian diaspora
is trying to instill hatred against Turkey through a worldwide campaign
on genocide claims ahead of the centennial anniversary of 1915,” Mr.
Erdogan said recently. “If we examine what our nation had to go through
over the past 100 to 150 years, we would find far more suffering than
what the Armenians went through.”

Speaking of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan: Here's a woman who once claimed she
had evidence that Turkish intelligence was blackmailing a US
congresswoman with a secretly recorded tape of her engaged in lesbian
sex -- evidence she gathered from her couple months spent as an FBI translator -- promoting another sounds-legit theory while appearing on a right-wing crank's conspiracy show:

Huge, as they say, if true. Whatever one thinks of Edmonds, though: Donate! Buy her book! This DVD too! And #StayWoke!

Moving on: Russia's state media reports that
Libya's internationally recognized government, which controls the
Eastern half of the country, plans to revive some Gaddafi-era contracts
with the Russian Federation. It's unclear which contracts are being
referred to there, but back in February Al-Monitor reported that Russia
was using Egypt as a middleman to sell arms:

During
Russian President Vladimir Putin’s visit to Cairo Feb. 9, the Libyan
army’s chief of staff, Maj. Gen. Abdulrazek Al Nadoori, also arrived in
the Egyptian capital in an unannounced visit, in which he met with
Russian officials to sign agreements for the supply of Russian weapons
to the Libyan army.
Col. Ahmed al-Mismari, the spokesman for the
Libyan chief of staff, told Al-Monitor, “Arming the Libyan army was a
point of discussion between the Egyptian and Russian presidents in
Cairo.”

Libya, however, technically remains under a United Nations-imposed arms embargo, which the U.K. and U.S. have thus far been unwilling to remove. The Libyan government (or, again, one of its governments) is asking for Russia's help in lifting it. My humble, personal opinion: The last thing Libya probably needs right now is more guns.

Finally, ON TWITTER (collective "ugh"), imprisoned whistleblower Chelsea Manning -- loved by those who love to see war crimes exposed; loathed by liberals for exposing the wrong party's criminals and Undermining Faith in Government -- has sent a handwritten note
verifying that her social media account is not in fact a deep-state
PsyOp meant to make us all love Spotify and Hillary Clinton or whatever
online's #justaskingstupidquestions crew thought her use of emoticons was supposed to achieve.

Still,
though: Why hasn't questioned the official narrative on 9/11 or, more
importantly, linked to my blog? I, for one, will continue to keep one
eyebrow raised.

LATE ADDITION: Corporate media coverage of the conflict in Syria continues to be abysmal, bad reporting aided by the fact there are precious few reporters on the ground. Case in point: While it may make for a good, sensationalist headline, not all rebels who are Muslim are "Islamists," not all Islamists are Al Qaeda and, as during the US occupation of Iraq, not all members of Al Qaeda's declared affiliate are actually true believers in its hermit leadership's ideology.

Monday, April 13, 2015

Saudi Arabia began bombing its neighbor, Yemen, on March 26,
responding to a call from the country's unelected president, Abd-Rabbu
Mansour Hadi, for intervention to beat back a military campaign by
Houthi rebels -- allied with former strongman and erstwhile U.S. ally,
Ali Abdullah Saleh -- who the Saudi monarchy claims are nothing more
than a proxy force backed by Iran in order to destabilizing the Islamic
Republic's foes in the Arabian peninsula. That claim, making a complex
power struggle out to be a Iranian proxy war and nothing more, if
self-servingly reductionist, the product of Saudi paranoia that its own
repressed population might see what's happening next door and rise up
too (which would, of course, be blamed on Iran, just as other actors in
region dismiss the idea their own brutality is the root of their
problems in order to cast blame entirely on "outside agitators").

The rebels may not be saints,
but even if Iran were providing the Houthis with every bullet they fire
(ignoring for argument's sake that, in fact, many of those bullets were
originally provided by the US government to Yemen's military before the
rebels took them, while some weapons were reportedly handed to them directly
by US personnel evacuating the country), the reality is that only one
party to the conflict is bombing the country from the air with the
support of the world's leading imperialist power. And that's killing a
whole lot of innocent people.

At
least 648 civilians have been killed since the intervention began, and
Saudi-led strikes have hit hospitals, schools, a refugee camp and
neighborhoods, according to U.N. officials.

That works out to be at least 38 civilians killed by U.S.-backed Saudi air strikes each day, on par with Israel's last bombing run
on the densely populated prison of Gaza, which reportedly worries U.S.
officials who want the conflict to be over so they can resume killing
alleged members of Al Qaeda (and, of course, whoever happens to be in the vicinity). I'd suggest the more powerful, morally defensible argument against the Saudi campaign is that it's killing 38 civilians a day, but there's a reason, I guess, that I'm writing on Wordpress and not being anonymously quoted in the WSJ.

Relatedly:
I'd like to take this moment to caution against suggesting that this
war places the war criminals "on the same side" of Al Qaeda, as Glenn Greenwald stated on Twitter
in order to score points against the US and the Saudis; it's a good way
to get retweets -- and bashing the American government and its awful
allies is indeed a worthy endeavor -- but Greenwald's take is, alas, a
hot and vulgar one that unfortunately has the effect of erasing the fact
many of those fighting the Houthis on the ground in southern Yemen consider themselves socialists.
I think these people would probably object to being cast as "on the
same side" of a reactionary terrorist organization, whether that
organization is Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula or the Saudi military,
just as peace activists objected to the neoconservative smear that they
were apologists for jihad because they were "on the same side" as
jihadists in opposing the U.S. occupation of Iraq. All I am saying is: Give nuance a chance.

Saturday, April 11, 2015

After Bashar al-Assad’s regime spent nearly two years massacring Palestinians in Yarmouk camp, after regime bombardments destroyed nearly 70 percent of the camp, after thousands were arrested and tortured to death, and after civilians were forced to resort to scavenging through trash and weeds to ward off starvation — after all this, the world is finally paying attention to the situation in this long-suffering southern Damascus neighborhood. And all they want to talk about is the Islamic State.
I think this is a disgrace.

Fellas: If you're going to commit war crimes and, unlike the Islamic State, you don't want to attract the world's attention -- make sure you shave.

The
Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) official who announced an
agreement for a joint military operation between the Syrian president
Bashar al-Assad’s regime and Palestinian factions against ISIS in
Yarmouk refugee camp did so against PLO wishes and policies because of
allegiances to the Syrian government and may be removed from his
position as a consequence, Newsweek can reveal.

This
week, Ahmed Majdalani, the former Palestinian Authority Labour
minister, headed a delegation to the Syrian capital, Damascus, from the
West Bank for talks with the Syrian government and yesterday confirmed
that a “joint operation centre” will be created for Palestinian groups
in Syria and the Syrian regime to coordinate an offensive against ISIS
after the terror group captured large parts of the encampment last week.

However, a senior official within the PLO, speaking on condition of anonymity to Newsweek,
said that members of the Palestinian executive body were “very upset”
with Majdalani’s breaking of the PLO’s official line to announce
cooperation with the Syrian government, claiming that he did so because
the faction of which he is the secretary-general, the Palestinian
Popular Struggle Front, is supported by the Assad regime.

#####

Another
PLO official, Wasel Abu Yousef, said that the Syrian regime may destroy
the encampment by bombing the site behind the claim of attacking ISIS,
as eyewitnesses revealed to Newsweek yesterday that the regime had barrel-bombed the camp’s main hospital.

"We
know that if the [Syrian] army, with its planes and tanks, would
interfere, this would mean the complete destruction of the camp," Yousef
told the Associated Press.

The Baghdad bureau chief for Reuters has left Iraq after he was threatened on Facebook and denounced by a Shiite paramilitary group's satellite news channel in reaction to a Reuters report last week that detailed lynching and looting in the city of Tikrit.
The threats against journalist Ned Parker began on an Iraqi Facebook page run by a group that calls itself "the Hammer" and is believed by an Iraqi security source to be linked to armed Shiite groups. The April 5 post and subsequent comments demanded he be expelled from Iraq. One commenter said that killing Parker was "the best way to silence him, not kick him out."

Here's the story that has these Iranian-organized and U.S.-armed militias so upset.
Meanwhile, from the BBC: "Karl Marx on Alienation." Gillian Anderson (yes) explains Marx's theory on how capitalism alienates workers, reducing them to cogs in the machine who only truly live a few hours a day when they're not toiling away making products they themselves can't afford so a rich person they've never met can become even richer.

When an assisted living home in California shut down last fall, many of its residents were left behind, with nowhere to go.
The staff at the Valley Springs Manor left when they stopped getting paid — except for cook Maurice Rowland and Miguel Alvarez, the janitor.
"There was about 16 residents left behind, and we had a conversation in the kitchen, 'What are we going to do?' " Rowland says.
"If we left, they wouldn't have nobody," the 34-year-old Alvarez says.
Their roles quickly transformed for the elderly residents, who needed round-the-clock care.
"I would only go home for one hour, take a shower, get dressed, then be there for 24-hour days," says Alvarez.

Finally, a blast from the not-so-distant past, when another dictator beloved by the GlobalResearch.ca pseudo-left was cozying up to the absolute worst the imperialist West has to offer. "Gaddafi wants EU cash to stop African migrants":

"Tomorrow Europe might no longer be European, and even black, as there are millions who want to come in," said Col Gaddafi, quoted by the AFP news agency.
He was speaking at a ceremony in Rome late on Monday, standing next to Italy's Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi.
"We don't know what will happen, what will be the reaction of the white and Christian Europeans faced with this influx of starving and ignorant Africans," Col Gaddafi said.
"We don't know if Europe will remain an advanced and united continent or if it will be destroyed, as happened with the barbarian invasions."

Tuesday, April 07, 2015

I spoke to a left-wing activist in Moscow about the state of the
opposition in Russia, what's happening in Ukraine, and whether one form
of imperialism can be an effective, desirable counter to another. You can read the transcript over at Salon.

SANA,
Yemen — At least nine people from a single family were killed when what
appeared to be an airstrike by the Saudi-led military coalition struck a
home in a village outside Sana, Yemen’s capital, officials said
Saturday.

Village residents gave a higher toll, saying that as
many as 11 members of the Okaish family, including five children, were
killed in the bombing on Friday. The airstrike may have been intended
for an air defense base about a mile and half away, a Yemen Interior
Ministry official said.

Meanwhile, in Asia, the
United States is encouraging its ally, Japan, to abandon its
U.S.-drafted pacifist constitution so it can offload some of the cost of
militarily containing China, something the country's ultra-nationalist
prime minister, Shinzo Abe, has been more than willing to do, fond as he
is of his nation's much maligned war criminals. Some still remember history, however, and are warning against this. Again, in the Times, "Retired Japanese Fighter Pilot Sees an Old Danger on the Horizon":

“I
fought the war from the cockpit of a Zero, and can still remember the
faces of those I killed,” said Mr. Harada, who said he was able to meet
and befriend some of his foes who survived the war. “They were fathers
and sons, too. I didn’t hate them or even know them.”

“That is how
war robs you of your humanity,” he added, “by putting you in a
situation where you must either kill perfect strangers or be killed by
them.”

#####

“I realized the war had turned me into a killer of men,” he said, “and that was not the kind of person I wanted to be.”

A
Ministry of Youth Affairs and Sports official told the state-run
Islamic Republic News Agency that women and their families would be
allowed to attend most athletic events, except for those of “masculine”
sports, like wrestling or swimming, during which male athletes wear
uniforms or suits that cover little of their bodies.

Speaking
of the Islamic Republic, one of the more curious things to me is that
the recently agreed upon framework for a deal with Western powers over
its nuclear program is that members of United Against Nuclear Iran, a billionaire-backed alarmist group
that many have perceived as an Israeli proxy, are cautiously supportive
even as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is bellowing that the
deal threatens the whole existence of his white supremacist settler colony:

The Iranians won the right to research, but not to use more modern machines for production for the next 10 years.

At
Arak, which officials feared could produce plutonium, another pathway
to a bomb, Iran agreed to redesign a heavy-water reactor in a way that
would keep it from producing weapons-usable fuel.

Those conditions
impressed two of the most skeptical experts on the negotiations: Gary
Samore and Olli Heinonen of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard
and members of a group called United Against Nuclear Iran.

Mr.
Samore, who was Mr. Obama’s top adviser on weapons of mass destruction
in his first term as president, said in an email that the deal was a
“very satisfactory resolution of Fordo and Arak issues for the 15-year
term” of the accord. He had more questions about operations at Natanz
and said there was “much detail to be negotiated, but I think it’s
enough to be called a political framework.”

I realize all these stories are from the Times. What can I say? They had a good week. I'll do better next time.

Friday, April 03, 2015

A delegation of old crackpot commies associated with the Workers
World Party, for whom every despotic government is either "U.S.-backed
and bad" or "not U.S.-backed, so actually good and even communist,"
recently travelled to Syria to commend dictator Bashar Assad for killing
tens of thousands of poor Syrians in his fight against imperialism and
"a mercenary invasion of more than 20,000 fighters," by which they don't mean the more than 20,000 mercenaries and militiamen from Lebanon, Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan being paid to fight for a regime running out of actual Syrians willing to take up arms on its behalf.

The
trip is grotesque enough: Dialogue is one thing, lending "left" cover
to a man whose family has grown extremely wealthy by exploiting the
working class is quite another. What's especially galling is that, in an
article recounting their fantastic journey, these "anti-imperialist"
authoritarians allow a regime official to say the following:

“Syria
was formerly one of the fastest developing countries in the world,”
[Assad adviser Bouthaina Shaaban] continued, “and one of the safest. We
have free education and health care. We did not know poverty;
we grew our food and produced our own clothing. At universities, 55
percent of the students were women. In whose interest is it to destroy
this heritage? Who is the beneficiary of this?”

One adequate response to this might be: "LMAO, what?" But
seeing as this is a blog on the Internet and I have all the space in
the world, allow me to quote another article, this one from the World
Socialist Web Site.

"But aren't they Assad apologists too?" an
earnest reader asks. And I'm glad they did because yes, the folks at
WSWS kinda actually are -- but this article is from 2010, back before
some leftists decided that "anti-imperialism" requires dismissing the
efforts of tens of thousands of regular people to overthrow their
neoliberal oppressors, U.S. aligned (Libya) or not (Syria), and reducing
said uprisings to Zionist/American/Saudi imperialism. Back in 2010,
some socialists were reporting on the actual factors that would cause the residents of rich, tranquil Syria to later rise up against their benevolent leader:

Poverty in Syria has increased significantly in the past five years. The United Nations Human Development’s study of Poverty in Syria 1996-2004
is the most comprehensive statistical report currently available. It
found that the wealth gap widened and 11.4 percent of people, or 2.2
million of Syria’s 21 million population, lived in extreme poverty,
defined as unable to obtain their basic food and non-food needs, a sum
equal to SYP92 or US$2 per capita per day. Syria Today reports
that a new United Nations Development Programme report due out shortly
states that this figure rose to 12.7 percent in 2007.

A 2007
Central Bureau of Statistics report shows that the number of people
living in poverty—those only able to cover a “reasonable amount” of
their basic needs—rose from 30.1 percent to 33 percent between 2004 and
2007. But since 2007, the situation has deteriorated sharply. The
property real estate boom and the removal of some of the subsidies have
increased the cost of living.

The turn to the market and inward
investment has led to few new decent-paying jobs, while the lifting of
trade restrictions has increased imports and led to a fall in exports to
Turkey and other countries, forcing small traders and services out of
business. Unemployment is officially about 8 percent, but unofficial
estimates put it at about 20 percent, with many more under-employed.

Real
wage growth has fallen, according to official data, from 9.9 percent in
2005 to 3.2 percent in 2007, implying a fall in living standards as
prices have risen, with little left over for education, culture or
leisure activities.

On top of all this, Syria
suffered a severe drought in the years leading up to the 2011 uprising,
with 1.5 million people leaving their arid lands for the city, which
"had a catalytic effect" in a country, according to a report published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

While
foreign meddling of the Russian, Iranian, Saudi, Qatari, Turkish and
American variety has no doubt had a negative impact on Syria, leftists
would do well to remember that outside agitators are historically
ineffective at getting tens of thousands of people to take to the
streets in a totalitarian state where chanting "down with the dictator"
might very well earn one a bullet in the head. Imperial powers will
always attempt to shape events in their favor, with varying degrees of
success, but the masses are not as easily manipulated as the likes of
Ramsey Clark and Cynthia McKinney; when poor people rise up, it's
generally because they have nothing left to lose. That some of these
superficially "left" Assad apologists would present a neoliberal
dictator's denial of the existence of poverty in Syria as truth in the
service of an easier to digest "anti-imperial" narrative speaks pretty
loudly to the intellectual and moral poverty of the authoritarian left.

Thursday, April 02, 2015

My first reaction to journalist Ken Silverstein's piece
in Politico on why he hated his last employer was: Thank the good lord I
said “eh, no” when editors asked me to write something like this after
leaving Vice, which in my self-serving defense at least entailed
questions about ~ethics in journalism~ but, even still, who wants to
read a white guy complaining about his dream job not working out? Oh, boo hoo. And check that privilege. My god, man.

My
second thought: Nobody loves stories about journalists as much as other
journalists, which leads to their proliferation in the media, but why,
when the author himself says there was no “editorial meddling from the
top,” must we be subjected to thousands upon thousands of words about
“epic managerial incompetence”? At least the former has the benefit of
at least ostensibly being a story about something other than thoroughly typical inter-personal drama; of being about Issues, not just office politics. This, though?
If First Look Media were an Applebee's, Silverstein would staple 8
sheets of paper from a yellow legal pad to the comment card on the table
detailing, precisely, how the entire damn team working that Wednesday
night, from host to busser, was incompetent and grossly unprofessional.
His complaints might even have the merit of being true, but we would all
have a good snicker at the entitled guy freaking out over a lukewarm
mozzarella stick on a dirty plate.

This is
even worse that, which we would read only after the busser leaked it to
Gakwer: It's as if Silverstein read that comment card back to himself
and said, bewilderingly, "Let's get long-winded whine that makes me look
angry and petty and difficult to work with out there so everyone can
read it." We've all been tempted to write something like it, and some of
us have blogs where we sometimes do, but this is the sort of situation
where a friend, family member or editor should step in and say, "You're
upset and we get that it's totally justified but maybe sit on this for a
few weeks or, perhaps, until the end of time."

Silverstein's
piece does, however, speak to what I think is a generational divide in
journalism: The expectation that one's job isn't supposed to suck is not
one that those under 40 have ever really had. To get at what I mean,
here's Silverstein, complaining:

Employees were
initially told that we were free to spend whatever we needed for our
reporting and the company simply asked that we spend its money
responsibly, as we would if it were our own. But soon new orders came
down from management that made it difficult to pay for a source’s
drinks—and to report, at least in Washington, it is pretty much
required that you be able to take sources out for drinks to have
discreet, relaxed conversations. Over time, management began
closely scrutinizing expense reports. Some of us became so frustrated,
and intimidated, that we decided to simply stop expensing some
legitimate reporting costs because it wasn’t worth the hassle of trying
to get reimbursed.

The next nine words, in bold, are sincere: Silverstein has a done a lot of good journalism, if not so much at The Intercept (EXCLUSIVE: PROSECUTOR SAYS HE GOT THE RIGHT GUY.). He was a reliably good read at Harper's
and I have no reason to doubt some of that good journalism was indeed
helped along by a source drinking seven Manhattans on the company dime.
But most journalists – I want to say the vast majority ofjournalists, including those in Washington–
are expected to churn out journalistic content, including “exclusives”
that can go “viral,” without any sort of expense account and usually
without health insurance or even a business card on which the words
“staff writer” are printed. I have had outlets offer to publish stories
that could get me sued but which declined to offer me any legal
protection; they were happy to take the clicks, but the liability was to
be all mine. Freelancers in war zones are paid as little as $50 a piece
and it isn't much better in more peaceful places with higher costs of
living. Reporters are expected to take all the risks, getting the story
however they can, a process made harder by the fact no one just hands
scoops to journalists who lack reliable access to major platforms, with
the expectation they will be paid primarily in exposure. (“And maybe that will lead to something,” every freelancer's mother says on the phone when they aren't in the mood to broach the subject of law school again).

Silverstein
is certainly right to knock a billionaire for being a cheapskate – just
pay for the god damn booze, Pierre – but his complaints are remarkably
tone-deaf in an age when most of his peers would gladly trade the hassle
of filling out an invoice every time they write a $150 article for the extreme hassle
of saving receipts from the bar. I don't blame anyone for wanting the
free drinks and editors who will just hit “publish” on whatever one
sends in, but you can tell he comes from the shrinking but comfortable
world of staff writing, where the concept of an "expense report" isn't
just an inside joke among jaded freelancers. If alcohol is an essential
part of reporting, it's largely because journalists use it to cope with
the conditions of journalism, which the 1 percent of journalists at the
top would do well to acknowledge lest they come off as a bit spoiled
and out of touch. The problems Silverstein details might make for good
gossip over a beer, but they are also the sort of problems many others
would love to have.
Finally, much has been made about the fact
Silverstein says he never bothered to Google “Pierre Omidyar” before
going to work for Pierre Omidyar.

Understandably, thise strikes some as
unbecoming of an investigative journalist, but truth be told: All
billionaires are terrible people and in journalism, as in most
professions, there are really no “good bosses” (not even Amy Goodman).
Maybe it would've been smart to dig up a little dirt before accepting
the gig, but what would Silverstein have found? That this obscenely rich
individual offering to fund his journalism was motivated by something
otherthan the pursuit of truth and justice? That a billionaire
surrounded by people whose job it is to praise him would have an
inflated sense of his own abilities? Because that's the case everywhere
and every writer who wishes to do more than just wank off on WordPress
in front of a dozen people who already agree with them (hello) is forced
to deal with the same thing no matter where they work: Capitalism.

In
the absence of viable alternatives, the journalist who aspires to be
more than just a transcriptionist for power but needs money to live is
required to accept that money from people they probably would not want
bring home to meet Mom and Dad, at least if they desire a platform that
makes the sacrifice of journalism worth it (and if one's writing and
politics are more than just an attempt to fashion an online identity,
with no real attempt to change minds much less the world, platforms do
actually matter). If one finds the positives, such as access to food and
an audience, don't outweigh the compromises? Charge one last drinking
binge to the company and move on -- but if you're privileged enough to
have that expense account, which you use to file two to three stories a
month, not two to three every single day about what's trending on
Twitter and Reddit? Forego the "Why I Left _________" essay and, now
that you're freelancing, write about the exploitation of independent
contracting; you'll have to buy your own booze, but at least the source
who will be drinking it will be you.

Saturday, March 21, 2015

In 2010, George Diego and Allan Corrales of the Los Angeles Police
Department shot and killed an unarmed black man, Steven Eugene
Washington. The case was one of several high-profile shootings that
activists protesting under the auspices of “Black Lives Matter” brought
up with LAPD Chief Charlie Beck when they met with him
in January: Washington had been walking down Vermont Avenue, minding
his own business, when Diego and Corrales drove by in their cruiser,
deemed said walking suspicious, and shot him in the head,
telling investigators that they feared his cell phone was a gun; the
phone wasn’t even in his hand, but it was dark and so was he and so the
officers were placed on desk duty instead of being fired.

The
officers did have their day in court, though – they sued, alleging
discrimination. Would a white cop who kills an unarmed black man get
stuck behind a desk or would they get a promotion and be hailed as a
hero on AM radio? A jury ruled in their favor, awarding over $4 million
to the two killer cops whose only punishment had been getting to keep
their jobs as police while facing none of the risks cops cite to
justifying killing civilians.